Sarah Bjac, whose partner Philip Wood was on board the plane, leads a group of relatives of passengers who want more answers.

She said yesterday the latest black box twist was “consistent with the tangled mess that is this supposed investigation”. Ms Bajc said from her home in Beijing: “It is a sad commentary on the situation that family members are rejoicing that there is still a chance that our loved ones are being held hostage by hijackers. It is a better option than dead at the bottom of the ocean.”

She said the family members were being managed and intentionally distracted.

“I’ve been saying this since the first weeks. We are being managed and intentionally distracted. Lead, redaction, lead, redaction, lead — until three months later there is not a single solitary fact or piece of evidence that has been proven to be true, not one. Both the leads and the redactions come from a mix of official sources and “leaks”. Nothing is logical or consistent or according to standard expected protocols much less common sense.”

Mystery disappearance ... it is now believed the pings came from a source not related to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.Source: AFP

‘INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TASK’

But oceanographer Dr Erik Van Sebille warns against criticism of authorities in the search.

He said deep ocean research, particularly in a place like the southern Indian Ocean, was an incredibly difficult task.

He said oceans were full of sounds and it was not easy to discern them.

‘Sounds are made at all different frequencies. The ocean is more a cacophony of these different sounds. You might think you hear one thing but it is another,” Dr Van Sebille, from the University of New South Wales said yesterday.

“I think we should be very careful with our criticism. There is no team in the world that could have done a better job than this. Navies know their sounds in the ocean like nothing else,” he said, adding that the Australian Navy were among world experts in underwater sounds.

Dr Van Sebille said so many things in the ocean made sounds and it was very difficult to differentiate them.

“Everything in the ocean makes sounds, from whales to shrimps that actually make clicking sounds. Biologists use instruments that make sounds to track animals,” he said.

He said that while the 850quare kilometres search by Bluefin-21 did not sound like a lot, searching that amount of ocean floor was a painstakingly slow task.

No sign of the plane ... specialists prepare to launch the Phoenix Autonomous Underwater Vehicle ‘Artemis’ Bluefin-21 from the vessel Ocean Shield.Source: AFP

PRIMARY SEARCH ZONE ‘DISCOUNTED’

Australian authorities today discounted an area that had been considered the most likely zone.

The triangle of water in the Indian Ocean was seen as the prime area largely as a result of the acoustic pings picked up last month, and thought to be from the missing plane’s black box.

But the Australian Transport Safety Bureau today advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and that the area can be discounted as the final resting place of MH370.

Transport Minister Warren Truss told parliament the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane will continue in the Indian Ocean even though it was not found in the recent search zone. He said search is about to move into a new phase and Australia was committed to doing everything it can to find the plane.

“We are still very confident that the resting place of the aircraft is in the Southern Ocean,” he said.

SEARCH TEAMS HEAD HOME

The ATSB said Bluefin-21 completed its last mission yesterday afternoon searching the remaining areas in the vicinity of the acoustic signals which were detected in early April by the Towed Pinger Locator deployed from ADV Ocean Shield.

“The data collected on yesterday’s mission has been analysed. As a result, the JACC can advise that no signs of aircraft debris have been found by the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle since it joined the search effort,” it said in a statement.

HUNT TO CONTINUE

The next search begins in August and is expected to take about 12 months.

“Unfortunately this is a painstaking effort in a very large ocean.” The next area could be 800 kilometres long and 70km wide, he said.

Manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, said the hopes of many had been dashed by the failure to find the plane in the most recent search zone.

“Once again we offer our condolences and words of comfort to the families and friends of the passengers on MH370 who still await more news,” he said.

It’s over ... the search for the plane in the Indian Ocean has come to an end.Source: AP

SHOCK CIRCLES THE GLOBE

The news has come as a shock and disappointment for relatives who are still searching for answers.

New Zealander Danica Weeks, whose mechanical engineer husband, Paul, had boarded MH370 on his way to start a new job in Mongolia, remains in Perth, where their family moved after the Christchurch earthquakes in 2011.

“When your child cries for their father, it just breaks your heart and I can’t tell them the truth because I don’t know,” Ms Weeks told the Seven Network.

“I still haven’t reconciled that he’s not coming back, because I’ve had nothing.

“When you don’t have anything — not even a piece of the plane, just nothing, and so many different stories — how can you not have a little piece of hope?” The couple have two boys, Lincoln, 3, and 13-month-old Jack

US BREAKS THE BAD NEWS

The official word came after a US Navy official told CNN this morning that the pings are now universally believed to have come from a man-made source unrelated to the missing jetliner, and not from the plane’s data or cockpit voice recorders.

Michael Dean, the Navy’s deputy director of ocean engineering, said that if the pings had come from the recorders, searchers would have found them.

“Our best theory at this point is that (the pings were) likely some sound produced by the ship ... or within the electronics of the Towed Pinger Locator,” Dean said.

“Always your fear any time you put electronic equipment in the water is that if any water gets in and grounds or shorts something out, that you could start producing sound.”

When asked if the other nations involved in the search effort also believed the pings were unrelated to MH370, Dean answered “yes”.

No sign of the plane ... specialists prepare to launch the Phoenix Autonomous Underwater Vehicle ‘Artemis’ Bluefin-21 from the vessel Ocean Shield.

He went on to tell CNN that it is not possible to categorically rule out that the pings came from the black boxes but that there is no evidence to suggest they did.

The US Navy later dismissed Mr Dean’s comments as “speculative and premature” — but that was before the ATSB’s announcement this afternoon.

“The US has been working cooperatively with our Malaysian, Australian and international partners for more than two months in an effort to locate MH370,” US Navy spokesman Chris Johnson said in a statement.

“Mike Dean’s comments today were speculative and premature, as we continue to work with our partners to more thoroughly understand the data acquired by the Towed Pinger Locator.

“As such, we would defer to the Australians, as the lead in the search effort, to make additional information known at the appropriate time.”

The latest revelation comes after News Corp Australia last week revealed that underwater scientists have labelled the search for MH370 a “debacle” and say Prime Minister Tony Abbott was playing politics when he prematurely announced the black box pingers had been found.

The acoustic experts, who do not wish to be identified, said the four crucial signals detected by a US pinger locator were almost certainly not from the missing Malaysian Airlines plane’s black boxes, but from another man-made source.

They insisted that the signals were in the wrong frequency and detected too far apart to be from the boxes.

“As soon as I saw the frequency and the distance between the pings I knew it couldn’t be the aircraft pinger,” one scientist said.

That conclusion is supported by the lack of success from a detailed search of the area conducted by the US deep sea drone Bluefin 21.

In answer to questions from News Corp Australia the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said that the signals were “likely” sourced from electronic equipment and were “believed to be” consistent with the Flight Data Recorder.

However the scientists said the 33.3 kilohertz frequency of the signal was very different to the 37.5 kilohertz generated by underwater acoustic beacons. The signals were also detected some 30km and four days apart.

The JACC has refused a request to release recordings of the signals for independent analysis and it did not release the exact location or precise depth of the signals.

Agency head retired defence chief Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said the signals were still being analysed to ensure nothing was overlooked.

Meanwhile the families of passengers aboard missing flight MH370 accuse Malaysia of a cover-up over newly released satellite data, saying it is incomplete and does not prove that the plane crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

This comes as the first stage of the search off the west coast of Australia concludes without finding any debris from the missing Boeing 777.

The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 passengers and crew on board, disappeared in the early hours of March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Since then no trace of the jetliner has been found, despite a multi-million dollar search effort.

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